


Glass

by Reyairia



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, F/M, Romance, Suicide, Tragedy, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 01:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyairia/pseuds/Reyairia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was in love with you, you know that, right?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glass

“So how’s the dating scene going now, Liara? I mean, ya got to have had enough time now, right?”

A ghost of a smile tingled at the corners of Liara’s mouth, her father’s voice always so welcomingly blunt when she was usually drowning in a sea of diplomacy and subtlety. It wasn’t that she did not enjoy being the shadow broker, but it was nice to hear it straight from Aethyta in a bar where she could get away from it in the sound of clinks and chatter. Of course, that did not mean she didn’t have access to some of the security cameras. Her father did seem to attract strange and unique customers, and only a look behind her shoulder confirmed it; a famous – or infamous, depending on who you were to ask – hanar anarchist drooped against the wall, the tips of his tentacles at the floor twitching at the vibrations emanating from the speakers.

“Hey, I’m not being-?“ The asari matriarch started again, dropping the hand she had on her hip.

“No, no,” Liara lifted up her hand to get Aethyta to pause. “I had years to prepare for Shepard’s death, years to mourn. I enjoyed it but…” The younger woman paused slightly, her eyes lost in the patterns of the bar counter, blue, black and violet all meshing together in a confused mess. One splotch looked like a thresher maw, another vaguely like an omni-tool, and a third one looked like a… no. She was only being overly-imaginative once again. “Perhaps… it’s for the best.”

Somewhere in the bar a glass dropped, and broke, but despite the sharp sound and gasps that followed, Liara barely paid it any heed. The nervous chipper died for a few seconds, but resuscitated as soon as Aethyta barked an order towards a skinny turian employee over her head. When the shattered glass fragments were gone, said employee’s back was straight, the customer offered a new glass, it was as if nothing had ever happened. There were plenty more of them, along with liquor, where it came from.

“Not the fairy-tale romance you envisioned, huh?” Aethyta’s attention brought back to her daughter, her words furtive but respectful as she leaned in on the counter just in time for Liara to sigh and push herself away from it and into the back of her tall chair, cushion squeaking from her movement.

“It’s not like that! … Well it sort of is... but…” Liara sighed, deeper this second time, part in admittance, part in resignation. “I guess… I just didn’t realize being a silly maiden in the middle of a war,” she averted her gaze from her father’s eyes, first returning it to the counter, then to the other patrons. Neither the sight of frenzied patterns nor strangers offered her any comfort, and it retreated to her hands, gloves soothingly white against the colored chaos. “Shepard and I wanted different things. I enjoyed my solitude in both my occupations, the quiet peace,” a bittersweet feeling forced her to smile, thinking of her late bondmate. “Shepard couldn’t escape the fame and crowds, the alliance military, even if she wanted to. Goddess, she hated politics…”

The music changed, the earlier jittery tune slowly fading into a more melodious song. Liara recognized it from the Fleet and Flotilla series. It seemed to have turned into a classic, still churning out new remakes and adaptations every few years, but still an odd choice for a bar. Liara found herself taking a sip of a drink she had barely touched, thinking about her old quarian friend. In a way she had been avoiding it since the last time they had seen each other, but it was probably best to meet up with Tali soon.

“Yeah… sometimes we need a bondmate like that when we’re stupid maidens to kick us towards the right direction.” Aethyta started to clean at the counter with a flimsy looking cloth, changing the shape of the earlier smudges into unrecognizable forms. “Any new contenders though?”

Someone came to Liara’s mind, but she dared not voice it.

Aethyta did that for her instead.

“Say, I was looking at some of those vids of your old lectures.” Satisfied at least until later, the matriarch wrapped her hand around the edge of the counter, her hip leaning under it. “And let me tell ya, I don’t need four eyes to see what that prothean was thinking wh-

“He’s dead.”

Liara had not spoken loudly, but her voice, her words, were sharper than the broken glass as it cut through the small talk surrounding the two, and the incongruent melody that taunted her. A glare from her father was enough to divert the unwanted attention away, before questioning her even further, while the younger asari drooped her torso forward, her face resting on her coupled forearms. 

_She remembered Javik’s golden-lit eyes as he greeted her, his “kukuku” poking fun at her as she tripped on a thin layer of what once was foundation for a building, the broadness of his shoulders as he gave his back to her, overlooking the digsite whose jags and needles stabbed the cloudless yellow sky, a harsh ground that had already injured a careless student. He was so much like Shepard, Liara noted, and yet..._

“But,” Aethyta was too shocked by Liara’s reaction to drop to sympathy quite yet. “I thought-

_Liara can smell the scent of iron, taste her tears in her mouth. She can see how both stain the sand beneath her, gritty and dark in color, see a quarian’s elongated shadow brush the ground. She feels the wet sand as it sinks underneath her, flooded in liquid, and the hot star rays that sting at her skin. There is the weight of Javik in her arms, on her shoulder as she props him up against it, sobbing quietly onto the top of his crest, a less than forgiving surface for her forehead. Liara whimpers something to him, but her mind is such a confounded and lost blur that she cannot quite remember her own words. What she does is that despite his body covered in blood, his fingers only become wet as his hand finds itself on her cheek._

_“Foolish asari.” The noise that escapes his throat is more cough than chuckle. “What makes her… what makes you think… I ever… stopped…?”_

“He took his own life.”

Her words were softer now, perhaps muffled as she stretched out her arm and leaned her head against it. Her mind was gone from Aethyta, gone from the bar, and had wandered to the lectures, to the digsites that were jagged or sandy, safe in council space or at the edges of the terminus. It went to the shambles of prothean artifacts unearthed from the ground, too broken to serve their obsolete purpose any longer.

Javik had thought he was one of them. 

Aethyta was silent, and Liara had the feeling that it was more out of knowing than out of ignorance. Perhaps her father knew something she didn’t, or perhaps it was something she did know, but was not fully ready, willing, or able to admit.

“You gonna want something stronger, babe?” The matriarch finally suggested.

“Yes… please.”


End file.
